Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/777

 THE GENESIS OF ETHICAL ELEMENTS.

I. SELECTION AND SURVIVAL.

If we would understand how a race becomes acclimated in a new region — the French in Algiers or the Dutch at the Cape — we must make large use of the principle of selection and survival. The immigrants always vary considerably among themselves in power of resistance to the climate, and if we divide them into two equal groups, of those who are little suited to it, and those who are more suited to it, we shall find the death-rate much higher in the former group. This enables the offspring of the latter group to gain on the others, till in a few generations the immigrating race has, as it were, been made over and adapted to the new climate. Now, this principle of unequal death-rates (or birth-rates) is the key, not only to accli- mation, but to all manner of fitnesses in nature.

But something very like it is at work in society. There were many styles of gold-washing on the Sacramento in 1849. But one style was gradually found to be more convenient than the others, and became after a while the standard way of wash- ing out gold, which newcomers adopted as a matter of course. A like weeding out of inferior individual practices brings to light a standard form of pot or tool or weapon, a standard mode of tilling or breeding, a standard sex relation or education of the young, which is uniform for all, possesses authority, and may be termed a culture element. Besides this evolution of customs and forms of life guided by the principles of convenience, there is an evolution of beliefs guided by the principle of verity. When many sayings concerning anything are afloat, opinions about dreams or sickness or darkness or weather or good luck, the high death-rate among them insures the triumph of those views which for the time and place seem to be the truest. In this way arise general beliefs which come in time to get a good deal of social force behind them.

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